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All breakup notes should be written in playlist format now

All breakup notes should be written in playlist format now

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Thank you, don’t ghost me

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One way to ask somebody whether they’re still feeling it, romance-wise, is to make them a playlist. This is a tried-and-true method for conveying your feelings and implying the question, “Are my feelings the same as your feelings?”

For example, you might remember the Jack’s Mannequin song “The Mixed Tape,” which is about a mixtape the frontman / singer / songwriter Andrew McMahon made for his ex-girlfriend, expressly intending to “burn a hole” in her (emotionally). That’s kind of a lot, but you get the picture. He later published a list of the songs on the actual tape he made, so other people could listen to them if they wanted and feel the same pain, but to be honest, it didn’t work on me. That’s because a playlist is specific to the emotional situation of the person who makes it and the person they give it to (or passive-aggressively play it near, in my experience).

Not so in the case of this very frank playlist, which I stumbled upon in the Ruined Childhood Tumblr. This playlist welcomes everyone in for the show, and the show is messy. Rather than a collection of moods, thoughts, feelings, and vibes, it’s a collection of song titles that form one run-on sentence.

According to the original tweet the “To: Wyatt” playlist was taken from, it was a message to a boy (named Wyatt, obviously) after only a few dates. Keep that in mind when you read Wyatt’s fairly brutal response.

This is a nightmare, but it’s also creative, and a good spin-off from a time-honored tradition of curating other people’s artwork as a way of expressing emotions when we have a hard time putting them into words ourselves. This is the best breakup note I’ve ever seen — way more effort than a text, much more frank than a ghosting, an infinitely better story to tell your friends, and not that painful, since it’s also hilarious.

I’m really mad I didn’t include this in “How to make the most of Spotify playlists,” a post that is now woefully incomplete and embarrassing.